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Synopsis:
Theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is
mounting a new play. His life catering to suburban
blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, New
York is looking bleak.
His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) has left him to pursue her
painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive (Sadie
Goldstein) with her. His therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Hope
Davis), is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at
counseling him. A new relationship with the alluringly
candid Hazel (Samantha Morton) has prematurely run aground.
And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down
each of his autonomic functions, one by one.
Worried about the
transience of his life, he leaves his home behind. He
gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City,
hoping to create a work of brutal honesty. He directs them
in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live
out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city
outside. However, as the city inside the warehouse grows,
Caden's own life veers wildly off the tracks. Somewhere in
Berlin, his daughter is growing up under the questionable
guidance of Adele's friend, Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh).
His lingering attachments to both Adele and Hazel are
causing him to helplessly drive his new marriage to actress
Claire (Michelle Williams) into the ground. Sammy (Tom
Noonan) and Tammy (Emily Watson), the actors hired to play
Caden and Hazel, are making it difficult for the real Caden
to revive his relationship with the real Hazel. The textured
tangle of real and theatrical relationships blurs the line
between the world of the play and that of Caden's own
deteriorating reality. The years rapidly fold into each
other, and Caden buries himself deeper into his masterpiece.
As he pushes the limits of his relationships, both
personally and professionally, a change in creative
direction arrives in Millicent Weems (Dianne Wiest), a
celebrated theater actress who may offer Caden the break he
needs.
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